Nielsen Launches Digital Ratings To Measure TV Viewers Online
- by Wayne Friedman , April 30, 2013
Expanding its metrics services on the Internet, Nielsen now has announced a pilot effort for TV/video "program" content -- called Nielsen Digital Program Ratings.
A number of TV networks
and media companies have signed -- A+E, ABC, AOL, CBS, The CW, Discovery Communications, Fox, NBC and Univision -- to participate in the online trial which will begin in May and go through July.
Nielsen says the effort will use the same methodology of its anticipated Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings. Nielsen says Digital Program Ratings will provide similar overnight audience data,
including unique audience, stream counts and reach by age and gender for TV programming viewed online.
The two metrics -- Nielsen Digital Program Ratings and Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings
-- will offer a more "holistic" view of the online and TV audience for both programming and advertising content. Nielsen plans the release of Nielsen Digital Program Ratings later this year, which
will include time duration "weighting" of video and reporting of TV-comparable ratings.
Both services will combine "traditional Nielsen TV and online panel data with aggregated, anonymous
demographic information from participating online data providers, including Facebook."
Eric Solomon, senior vice president for global digital audience measurement at Nielsen, stated:
“As a companion product to Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings, Nielsen Digital Program Ratings will enable clients to better understand the online audience for their programming by harnessing the
same methodology Nielsen already uses to measure the audience for related advertising.”
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So does this mean that the 'broadcasters' or 'content owners' tag the content before uploading it? Would the tag be preserved in any unauthorised copies? If so, good move. All we need then is to work out how much of the viewing audience was duplicated.